Making a Long Story Short

I’ve moved on into a wonderful third retirement, so I’d like to encapsulate the five years from where I left off in my book, Systems Entrepreneurship.

?My basic agenda was to connect teams of students with outside partners to tackle world problems and learn systematically from their efforts – and do this at scale. The prototyping we’d done with Conservation International and the capstone projects at UCLA Anderson served as the framework. I sketched an intelligent information system that could help overcome the disadvantages of scale that small-team efforts inevitably encounter. Beyond the immediate impact, what is left behind is a record of the processes and results from which we can learn what works and what doesn’t. While I did not anticipate the emergence of Open AI and the large language models (LLMs), I knew more than five-years ago that data mining and machine-learning algorithms were ready to undertake this effort.

?I left off in my book talking about my engagement in the Helena think tank’s pursuit of Asimov’s MULTIVAC. While Helena’s work on MULTIVAC was fading I reconnected with Wendelin Slusser, with whom I’d supervised action research in the past but was then the Vice Provost in charge of the Healthy Campus Initiative (HCI), one of the major reasons UCLA is the most desired undergraduate campus. HCI incubated what became the Epicenter for Action Research. I initiated a few efforts to build the information tool kit I needed before the RA that HCI supported found monday.com. We found an alignment of agendas and the Epicenter was given 250,000 pro-licenses a year to take these efforts to scale. That’s about $48 million per year of in-kind services. Getting that five-year agreement between UCLA and monday.com is a book on its own. Along the way the Epicenter became monday.com’s Academic Partner of the Year in 2021.

?We were outgrowing HCI, and I looked to the Institute for Carbon Management (ICM) as a home. I had been helpful to ICM as it was being created in 2019. After I was assured that our efforts wouldn’t interfere with their world-changing technology innovations, I received formal approval from the Executive Vice Chancellor (EVC) to shift the Epicenter’s home to ICM. We set up a reasonable budget with ICM committing to 25% for five years. I asked for some support from the EVC and got a flat “No” before it was tempered into “See what other people pledge and come back to me.” We scaled to serving 63 centers on 11 campuses throughout the UC and CSU system, mainly UCLA, and over 1800 users, along with a training and certification program co-certified by monday.com. The infrastructure was there to go from 1,800 to 250,000 users a year.

?I went back with the five-year 25% ICM commitment, Anderson’s commitment of 12.5% for three years, private parties pledged 25% for five years and the 25% I committed. I showed this to the EVC and he offered no money at all. Not a penny after stringing me along for an extra six months. Nor did the administration encourage any new leaders to step forward. So, I retired. It’s someone else’s turn in the trenches.

?My feelings of betrayal didn’t fade until I returned to what I had given up for my academic career. Fine art and printmaking, areas I loved in the 1970s, were set aside to make room for my academic writing. I knew I could do a lot of different things, but not all of them at once. The posted article “Where I See Beauty in the World” expresses what I feel now. It was written as a program note for the UCLA Emeriti Art Show, which will show my work in May 2024. As I slide into 80, looking for beauty in a tumultuous and dangerous world, is a joyous diversion that perhaps only the truly retired can indulge. After 55 years on the UCLA faculty, I feel I’ve earned this retirement.